Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, can be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.

I wouldn't touch a superlative again with an umbrella.

Said of her husband on the day their divorce became final: Oh, don't worry about Alan. . . . Alan will always land on somebody's feet.

Telegram to a friend who had just become a mother after a prolonged pregnancy: Good work, Mary. We all knew you had it in you.

Benchley and I had an office in the old Life magazine that was so tiny, if it were an inch smaller it would have been adultery.

[On William Lyon Phelps's Happiness:] It is second only to a rubber duck as the ideal bathtub companion. It may be held in the hand without causing muscular fatigue ... and it may be read through before the water has cooled. And if it slips down the drain pipe, all right, it slips down the drain pipe.

Perhaps it suddenly brought to us the sense of change. Or irresponsibility. But don't forget that, though the people in the twenties seemed like flops, they weren't. Fitzgerald, the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time.